Recent articles

How news media are setting the 2020 election agenda: Chasing daily controversies, often burying policy

It’s a paradox of examining political coverage. Are news media just reporting what the political candidates are talking about? Or does political journalism really set the agenda by selecting stories […]

November 11, 2019November 13, 2019 Aleszu Bajak, Dan Kennedy and John Wihbey Election Tracker

How The Boston Globe is using a suite of niche products to cover the booming business of marijuana

How PopSci’s “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week” podcast is making science accessible

How Vox visualized segregation in the United States

How The Pudding visualized the prevalence of hyphenated names in sports

How the New York Times visualized auto carbon emissions in the U.S. and your city

How designer Nadieh Bremer teaches herself new skills to continue visualizing data in new ways

2020 Election Coverage Tracker

How news media are setting the 2020 election agenda: Chasing daily controversies, often burying policy

November 11, 2019November 13, 2019 Aleszu Bajak, Dan Kennedy and John Wihbey Election Tracker

Facebook continues to run political ads with misinformation

Even before Ukraine news, Joe Biden was the 2020 candidate with the most media coverage

Pete Buttigieg is flooding Iowa and New Hampshire with Facebook ads about his climate plan

In the effort to cover impeachment inquiry, media ignores 2020 candidates

Gabbard, Booker and Biden get most negative media coverage over last four months

Media continues to downplay Elizabeth Warren’s surging success in favor of a more comfortable narrative

Tutorials

How to explore correlations in R

This post will cover how to measure the relationship between two numeric variables with the corrr package. We will look at how to assess a variable’s distribution using skewness, kurtosis, […]

October 3, 2019October 4, 2019 Martin Frigaard Data Journalism in R, How to

How to make a multilayered Google My Map using news articles on invasive species

How I visualized “Trump” mentions in hip-hop songs using D3

How to download YouTube data in R using “tuber” and “purrr”

How to do basic text mining using Google Sheets

How to build margin of victory election maps with Datawrapper

How to make a longform narrative podcast without breaking the bank

Behind the Scenes

How The Boston Globe is using a suite of niche products to cover the booming business of marijuana

Last December, The Boston Globe launched a marijuana section – three months before the first recreational dispensary opened in Massachusetts. The section wasn’t the Globe’s first foray into the world […]

November 8, 2019November 12, 2019 Carro Halpin Behind the scenes, Interviews

How PopSci’s “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week” podcast is making science accessible

How Vox visualized segregation in the United States

How The Pudding visualized the prevalence of hyphenated names in sports

How the New York Times visualized auto carbon emissions in the U.S. and your city

How designer Nadieh Bremer teaches herself new skills to continue visualizing data in new ways

How The Washington Post built a game to demonstrate how autonomous cars work

Insights

Jaime Settle on how social media polarizes America

October 17, 2019October 23, 2019 Szu Yu Chen Insights, Interviews

Ideas from the ‘Radically Rural’ summit: Building a healthy media ecosystem through collaboration

Lessons on building a podcast’s community, both online and offline, from Radio Ambulante

Journalism schools need to focus on data, local news, social media and business models. Here are some that are.

Roundups

Six ways you might consider visualizing political issues and ideologies this election

October 8, 2019October 8, 2019 Ian Toman Roundups

Six digital skills all new journalists should consider learning and a road map to unlocking them

Eight tools, datasets and resources from the Open Data Science Conference

Six tools showcased at NICAR 2019 that you should probably learn

Longform

Journalism schools need to focus on data, local news, social media and business models. Here are some that are.

It’s no secret that journalism is at a bit of a crossroads. With technology and media consumption habits changing constantly, the industry has been thrust into a state of near […]

May 16, 2019May 16, 2019 Alexander Frandsen Insights, Longform

The future of machine learning in journalism

Journalists improve coverage of memes with careful reporting

How the Palm Beach Post unearthed an opioid conspiracy with roots in Florida

Social media and news: The dilemma of our time

How The Washington Post designs its Snapchat stories

Making the interactive documentary “Oil to Die For”

What is Storybench?

Storybench takes an “under the hood” look at the latest in digital storytelling, from data visualization and investigative journalism to virtual reality and the digital humanities. In addition to in-depth features and interviews with industry practitioners, we offer hands-on tutorials that can be “downloaded” right into the newsroom or classroom.

We also publish research we're running at Northeastern's School of Journalism along with collaborators in data science, communication studies, computational social sciences and information design. These projects include the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact, the Climate Journalism Lab, the 2020 Storybench Election Coverage Tracker and the Reinventing Local TV News project.

Want to contribute to Storybench? Pitch us or join us for a graduate degree in the Media Innovation program at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

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Storybench 2020 Election Coverage Tracker

The Storybench 2020 Election Coverage Tracker intends to keep tabs on the political coverage of the 2020 presidential election by covering media trends and using various data sources to explore media narratives.

Instead of keeping track of who’s ahead in the horse race, we’ll be turning our focus to those covering the horse race – the media outlets themselves and various proxies for public attention. Follow along here.

Best of Storybench

How the Wall Street Journal visualized 500+ conflicts of interest of the Trumps

Women on the 2020 campaign trail are being treated more negatively by the media

Getting started with data visualization in R using ggplot2

Understanding what makes a visualization memorable

Using French wine reviews to understand TF-IDF, a measure of how unique a word is to a document

Projects

Over the next two years we’ll be surveying the media’s coverage of the candidates and the issues. Follow along here.

The Reinventing Local TV News Project, from Northeastern’s School of Journalism, is analyzing the formats and practices of local news stations, and suggesting new ways of telling stories that can better engage diverse audiences. Read our inaugural post here.

The Climate Journalism Lab

The Climate Journalism Lab aims to examine and unpack the trends, tools and techniques employed by reporters and organizations covering climate change.

Join us at Northeastern!

Want to write for Storybench and probe the frontiers of media innovation? Apply for one of our graduate programs at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

Rolling admissions, no GREs required and financial aid available. Email here.

Interviews

Pizza, Press & Politics is our weekly speaker series at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. Watch interviews with David Filipov, Mike Workman, Jenn Smith, Martha Durkee-Neuman, Susan Labandibar, John Ward, Marc Fortier, Carol Gregory, Ling-Mei Wong and Elana Gordon.

Collaborative, Open, Mobile

Over the last three years, Storybench has interviewed 72 data journalists, web developers, interactive graphics editors, and project managers from around the world to provide an “under the hood” look at the ingredients and best practices that go into today’s most compelling digital storytelling projects.

They boil down to three key areas of emphasis: 1) highly networked, team-based collaboration; 2) an ethos of open-source sharing, both within and between newsrooms; 3) and mobile-driven story presentation. Read our paper here.